Castillon’s stories depict the disasters wrought by the intensity of the mother-daughter bond, while still suggesting the...
The English-language debut of a bestselling French author.
There is something inherently awful—or at least awfully delicate—in the relationship between mothers and daughters. Such, in any case, is the lesson embedded in this slim, incisive collection of very short stories. In some of these narratives, the parent-child bond is simply absent—the two principle characters are shackled together by the accident of birth, rather than by love. Many of these stories, though, describe a union marred by an excess of intimacy. Mothers destroy their daughters by overidentifying with them, by violating the boundaries that distinguish nurturance and protection from smothering and abuse. In “My Best Friend,” a woman embraces her own second adolescence when her daughter becomes a teenager, and, in “My Dad’s Not a Monster, Mom,” a woman with too much knowledge of her father’s betrayals sacrifices herself to her mother’s frailty. Some of these stories are rather funny. “Liar” offers a skeptical, child’s-eye view of adults in general and mothers in particular. In “I Said One,” a woman who grudgingly agrees to provide her husband with a single child finds a shockingly straightforward solution to the problem of twins. Castillon dares the reader to laugh—or, possibly, to not laugh—at the narrator’s utter lack of maternal instinct. Some of the stories are less successful than others: The tale of a woman who drives her tomboy daughter to breast implants and worse—much worse—is heavy-handed, as is the title story. Still, the best entries are well-honed and distinguished by vivid, unflinching candor. And there’s even the occasional a ray of hope: “Shame” is a lovely portrait of a teenaged girl learning to appreciate her mortifying—which is to say loving, attentive and appropriately protective—mother.
Castillon’s stories depict the disasters wrought by the intensity of the mother-daughter bond, while still suggesting the possibility of a love that’s sublime in its fragility and imperfection.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-101426-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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